Sexuality, Orientation, and Social Change

Before Alfred Kinsey, American public discourse treated heterosexuality and homosexuality as sharply distinct categories with clear, mostly hidden membership. Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), based on thousands of detailed interviews, produced findings that upended the tidy binary. He reported that roughly 37% of American men and 13% of women had had at least one same-sex sexual experience to orgasm after adolescence; that exclusive lifelong heterosexuality or homosexuality was less common than the dominant framework assumed; and that behavior was better described on a continuum than in two boxes.

The Kinsey scale (0 = exclusively heterosexual, 6 = exclusively homosexual, 1-5 = intermediate) expressed that insight operationally. Kinsey insisted that behavior was what he was measuring; identity and desire might vary in complex ways from behavior. Subsequent work distinguished the three dimensions explicitly — behavior (what one does), attraction (what one desires), and identity (what one calls oneself). Large-scale surveys such as the U.S. National Survey of Family Growth, the British NATSAL, and the French CSF have confirmed what Kinsey first suggested: the three dimensions overlap but do not coincide. More people report same-sex attraction than report exclusively same-sex identity; more report occasional same-sex behavior than report same-sex attraction; women's patterns differ from men's (Lisa Diamond's Sexual Fluidity, 2008, documents greater reported fluidity among women).

Kinsey's methods drew fierce criticism — his interview sample was not random; his statistics were exaggerated in popular reception; his subjects included overrepresented prisoners and college students. Yet the core finding — that human sexual behavior is far more variable than mid-century culture admitted — has held up in later probability-sample studies. The sociological lesson is that any sharp binary between 'the heterosexuals' and 'the homosexuals' misrepresents the distribution, and that measurement choices (of which dimension, with what wording) shape what is seen. Contemporary survey practice increasingly asks separate questions about attraction, behavior, and identity, and includes bisexual, queer, and other identity options alongside the classic two.